ne. She is
the crack-filler.

The Country Girl and her mother make some attempt to organize their work
and to introduce some little system into the program of the day.
Sometimes they will arrange for the daughter to be housekeeper one week
and assistant cook the next. Sometimes they divide the work equally
between mother and daughter; or two sisters take turns about doing the
entire housework.

An arrangement like this affords to both mothers and daughters a rich
opportunity. But a strange little paradox comes in here. If the
daughters wish to give the greatest degree of reverence and protection
to their mothers they should not pay too much attention to what the
mothers tell them to do. In other words if they will follow the
beckoning hand of progress and take up with the suggestions of modern
invention in their further housekeeping, they must depart from their
parents' advice and from the ways of the old folks. The oft repeated
saying, "what was good enough for my father is good enough for me,"
should never again be heard without protest by any member of the younger
generation--at least an inward protest that will rob it of its
depressing influence. It is not a want of reverence toward the memory of
our forefathers that makes us wish other and different conditions from
what they had. It is not a disloyalty to the living mother for the
daughter to say that she will not follow in her footsteps if she now
sees better ways of doing things. Shall not the large-hearted mother
wish that her child may have better and improved ways, greater
conveniences, lighter burdens, machinery for making work less
burdensome, more leisure for the higher life? She should--but does she?
She often does not see the use for the new-fangled appliances. She is
too stiff to change her ways, even when she sees that the new methods
are an economy of time, labor and nervous force. As to such a farm woman
as that, one who is so fixed in her ways that she will not listen even
for her children's sake, to the voice of progress: why, there remains
nothing for her to do but to pass on. Peace be to her! She has stood
there for a life-time and drudged and submitted and has done nothing for
household or community advancement. Some among the older women may awake
to a new life; here and there one will step over the abyss that
separates her from her daughter, will pass down and stand side by side
with the younger woman. But as a general thing the abyss is too